Sunday, April 13, 2008

We decided to be decadent with our tax refund and upgrade my wife from her 5 year old 1.2Ghz G4 iBook to a shiny new glossy-screened 2.4Ghz Core2Duo MacBook with 2G ram, 160G hard disk, and the SuperDrive. She's tickled.

I was impressed with how easy it was to get it going for her. She's been a faithful user of Time Machine since I bought her an external drive shortly after we upgraded all our machines to Leopard. One of the setup options when powering on the new machine was to transfer information from an existing Mac, with several options as to how to accomplish this task. One of them was from a Time Machine backup - which also happened to be what the lady at the Apple store recommended. So, about 40 minutes after plugging in the backup drive, she was in business. Impressively so. The mac connected right up to our Wi-Fi, all her apps were there and working, all the settings and passwords worked, and all her documents, photos, and other files were ready to go. The only things that she had to do were: authorize the computer on her iTunes account, and reconfigure the printers as those curiously didn't come over.

There are a few things I'm not so impressed about, though. First, the machine did not come with a video adapter, so hooking up her external 19" Samsung monitor and projectors at her work requires that we buy a $20 adapter. The last several macs I've purchased have included this. Also, it didn't come with the Apple remote for use with FrontRow and Keynote. My last Mac purchase included that item as well. Finally, when we bought the iBook for her back in '03, the folks at the Apple store were more than happy to help her copy documents and files from her windows based Dell laptop. This go around, however, they wanted $150 to do the same service, or charge $99 for their ProCare service, which includes one free transfer. That really turned out to be a non-issue for me given how easy it was accomplish.

It's a nice, fast, beautiful machine and we expect good service from it, just as we've had good service from her iBook.

2 comments:

Funny you should post this. I've been "teasing" hubby that I want to go Mac (for the first time... EVER)! and that my next computer WILL be a laptop... He's taking the "joke" lightly - but he doesn't know just how serious I might be. Granted, this is a big leap for me (I've always been a pc snob) but I think it'll be a wise move. Thanks for this post... gives me something fun to send to hubby :)

I think you'll be happy with your choice, Mags. Our entire family has switched - except for my in-laws, but we're working on them. A few months ago we were at my mother-in-law's house and she asked me to fix the "CD copier" on her Vista machine. I'd never even seen, let alone used, Vista at that point. It was kinda funny :)